Spam Poison - This
site has amusing snips of code that it claims will "redirect email
harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite
loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known
spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists
practically useless and of no commercial value." I always approve
of using the bad guys' own tools against them.

Reading Material

Spam Kings goes very behind-the-scenes
into some notable spammers, including Davis Hawke and Scotty
Richter. I’ve
personally tangled with a few of the low-lifes depicted in the
book. Here's the Amazon description:

With monikers like Shiksaa, Dr. F******, Mad Pierre and Terri
Tickle, the subjects of McWilliams's debut often sound cut
straight from pulp or comic-book noir farce
– despite being
real. A brisk narrative sets immediately on the trail of one of
them: Davis Hawke, a chess-geek neo-Nazi turned spam lord. We
also meet Shiksaa, a frustrated AOL user turned antispam
vigilante who, along with a posse of like-minded netizens,
fights running battles with spammers like Hawke, the man behind
countless herbal Viagra offers and get-rich-quick schemes.
McWilliams, an experienced business and technology reporter,
manages, at his best, to make stories of people glued to their
computers read like a thriller. His true (if virtual) crime
tale's quick pacing and use of online exchanges provide relief
from details of how, technically, spam kings operate (not
always gripping moments: "Hawke purchased and downloaded a copy
of Extractor Pro from the company's Web site"). This helps
McWilliams pull a lively tale from the messy web of
computer-geek criminality and righteous antispammer reprisal
– and
one from which spam-beleaguered computer users may take heart.

Spammer_X, as edited by security expert Posluns, offers no
regrets for his misspent life but does offer penance by way of
describing how spam and spammers work, including how they set up
their marks and deliver messages through proxy servers,
messenger systems, and stolen IP blocks. He shows how spammers
and crackers work together to get inside information and verify
lists. He then describes how spammers prepare texts and formats
and encode messages that will be opened and read by the
uninitiated. He has the unmitigated gall of including a chapter
about how to get paid as a spammer, and then gets down to ways
to thwart spam through filtering, advanced spam evasion
techniques, the law in the form of CAN-SPAM and other
possibilities for revenge, and spam's real cost and other
statistics. Distributed in the US by O’Reilly.

Spammers, scammers, and hackers are destroying electronic mail.
The email inbox that once excited you with messages from
friends, family, and business prospects now causes outright
dread and rage. With unsolicited and unwelcome email accounting
for as much as 80% of the world's email traffic, it's time for
all email users to act to turn the tide in this epic battle for
their privacy and sanity.

Spam Wars veteran, award-winning technology interpreter, Danny
Goodman, exposes the often criminal tricks that spammers,
scammers, and hackers play on the email system, even with the
wariest of users. He also explains why the latest anti-spam
technologies and laws can't do the whole job. Spam Wars provides
the readers with the additional insight, not only to protect
themselves from attack, but more importantly to help choke off
the economies that power today's time-wasting email floods.

Spam Wars puts to rest many popular misconceptions and myths
about email, while giving readers the knowledge that email
attackers don't want you to have. Danny Goodman's crystal-clear
writing can turn any email user into a well-armed spam warrior.